ABIT's new NVIDIA nForce2 motherboard, the NF7-S, supports the AMD Duron, Athlon, and Athlon XP, and also features dual 400MHz DDR memory controllers.
As well as its broad processor support, the NFS7-S comes with four USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, highly tweakable BIOS, excellent onboard sound, FireWire and support for Serial ATA.
As is common across many nForce2 boards, the NF7-S uses the Phoenix AWARD BIOS. This makes the NF7-S a serious plaything for overclockers – almost every significant item in the BIOS is tweakable. Tweakers would be spending most of their time at ABIT's Softmenu3, which replaces the need for changing jumper settings manually.
Thankfully the NF7-S also features ABIT's CPU Hardware Thermal Protection, which uses hardware detection to prevent CPU overheating. This means that in the event of a cooling malfunction the board will power off before the CPU has a chance to burn out, which is good if you decide to overclock but is also a handy safeguard for general use.
The board's general design is good, with an AGP slot that is spaced away from the first of five PCI slots, which makes the NF7-S an excellent board for those beefy graphics cards (such as ABIT's Siluro OTES, January 2003, page 66).
In addition to the two ATA/133 ports, there are two Serial ATA (SATA) ports. ABIT offers an optional 'Serilelle' IDE-to-SATA adaptor if you're planning to upgrade to the NF7-S, and do not have any SATA drives.
The board sports 5.1-channel sound, real-time Dolby Digital encoding and optical output. Also included are the analog sockets for forward, back and centre speakers, a mic-in and Line-in. Unless you have special music/sound needs the onboard sound is adequate.
The NF7-S standard bundle also ships with a comprehensive manual, utility/driver CD, a USB 2.0 bracket hosting two extra ports and one ATA cable. Additional options for the NF7-S package include the serial ATA kit and a FireWire bracket with two ports.
This motherboard is solid and well-rounded, supporting most features that are attractive in today's motherboard market. The only gripe is that it ships with only one ATA cable.